Continuing (belatedly, it’s been a hard couple of months) my walk around MSU’s campus, I also collected this Granger stamp in the Beal Botanical Garden, near the Library.
Also, here’s a bonus squirrel who was hanging out nearby. I wish I’d had a good camera on me, instead of just my tiny phone’s toy camera.
This stamp is on a driveway on the north side of East Michigan Avenue between Leslie and Horton. It’s what I call a ghost driveway; the house it belonged to was demolished sometime between 2008 and 2011, along with another one next door. It was one of those old houses-turned-businesses that line so much of the Avenue here. The city has an account for a business called “Digital Photo Magic” at this address, indicating delinquent taxes for 1999 and 2000, so they may have been here when this stamp was made. I can’t find much else about the history of the house except that in the 1950s and early ’60s it was home to a real estate agency called Brennan Realty Co.
This stamp is at the edge of the street, on the driveway belonging to Innova Salon and Day Spa, on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Allen and Shepard. L & L stamps are plentiful; I am more interested in the building this is in front of. Like several of the businesses in this stretch of Michigan, it is a big old house that has been converted into retail.
It has an impressive second floor porch, and the surprising part is that it isn’t original to the house. Google’s street view of the house taken in 2007 shows it with no porch on the second story (and thus looking like a more standard-for-the-neighborhood American Foursquare). No windows on the second story either; they apparently got covered over at some point in its retail history. The street view from 2008 shows it being renovated, with windows reappearing on the second floor and the previous first-floor storefront addition now absent. It looks much handsomer now than it did before the renovation.
I’m not sure when it went from residential to retail, but it spent a few decades as MacLaughlin’s Piano Mart (later MacLaughlin’s Piano and Organ Mart). On November 30, 1980, a Lansing State Journal ad reads, “DOUG BROWN MUSIC (formerly MacLaughlin) – serving Lansing over 30 years.” By 1997 the address was home to Print King. There really does seem to have been a time when this stretch of Michigan Avenue was the print shop district. I can think of at least four former print shops in the vicinity. A photo in the city’s property records dated March 2001 shows the Print King signage in place but a “FOR SALE” sign in the window. The 2007 Google street view shows Rapid Appliance Service here instead. Innova Salon moved in soon after.
As a followup to yesterday’s entry, I decided to head around the corner past Dagwood’s and walk the blocks of South Howard Street. I knew that the sidewalk was incomprehensibly intermittent there, and thought it would be interesting to capture a stamp from this strange liminal zone.
Disappointingly, I didn’t find a single stamp until I just about got to the southwest corner of Michigan and Howard. The stamp is just south of the corner. So here you go: the only sidewalk stamp on South Howard is this S & N Contractors stamp from 2000.
The remarkable scarcity of stamps led me to wonder if Lansing Township lacks a sidewalk marking requirement. It would be in keeping with its slapdash approach to sidewalks. It turns out, however, that they do have a sidewalk marking requirement:
All concrete walks and approaches shall have the name of the contractor constructing the walk, together with the year same is constructed, stamped in the surface of the walk near each end thereof, and at least once in the surface of each approach.
Section 21-3.8, Lansing Township Municipal Code
I saw one short section of new-looking sidewalk on Howard that should therefore be in the Hall of Shame.
The property adjacent to this stamp is currently just a big, empty, somewhat overgrown parking lot. It’s owned by the bus company Indian Trails and they use it to park the Michigan Flyer airport bus, which seems like an underutilization of the space. Prior to becoming bus parking, it was a car lot, the name of which I can’t remember if I ever knew. Going further back, I see Lansing State Journal advertisements for the Lansing Overhead Door Company at that address. It was there at least as early as 1935 and as late as 1978. The first mention I can find of a new address for Overhead Door is in 1981, by which time they had moved to East M-78, and there they remain today.
This stamp is in front of the large building on the southeast corner of East Michigan Avenue and Regent Street. The building was originally an A&P, but I know it best as H.C. Berger, a photocopier dealer. I cut through their parking lot countless times heading home from the bus stop after grad school classes. According to the City Pulse “New in Town” column on November 27, 2013, H.C. Berger had been there since 1973.
In 2013 the Berger family sold the building and H.C. Berger moved to Okemos. Today they seem to have either merged with or been bought by A.B. Dick Document Solutions of Grand Rapids. Their Web site has both names in the logo, but most of the text including the “About Us” page just refers to them as A.B. Dick.
At that time, a convenience store from down the street called Michigan Mart moved in. As reported in the above “New in Town” article, the new owners talked big about expanding it into a local grocery store with produce and a deli counter and the whole bit. Instead, disappointingly, it limped along with largely bare shelves as a party store in a way-too-big building before closing again. It has had a “for lease” sign in the window for ages now gathering dust. (The back of the building and its ample parking is used by Michigan Motors, a very odd supposed used car lot that does not actually appear to sell any cars.) One beneficial thing Michigan Mart did was to remove part of the corrugated siding from the building, allowing the nicer flat stone siding to surface.
I’m surprised I haven’t done this one yet. It’s out in front of The Avenue, the bar where my pinball league met when there were pinball leagues, which is on the north side of Michigan at Fairview. Not sure why L & L is just “L L” this time, but I’m sure it’s them. There’s a lot of variety in their stamps.
I spent several hours in the emergency room today for what turned out to probably be food poisoning, and I still don’t feel too great, so this is going to be a short entry. I’m thinking to do a bit more research on this location later on.
For now, though, I’ll just note that in 2000 this was still Raupp Campfitter, the last remaining location of what had once been a small Michigan chain of camping supply stores. I never had reason to go there, but I get the impression that it was well loved by those who did have reason to go there. At this time of year, when the ivy has died back, you can still see the RAUPP letters over the rear entrance. It closed in 2004 and was replaced by a cybercafe called Girls Gone Wired, which rather quickly (fortunately) became just Gone Wired. My grad school buddy and I used to meet up there for “grading parties.” Eventually, under the same ownership, it evolved into The Avenue Cafe, which at first was a cafe by day and bar by night, and eventually just gave up on the last vestiges of the cafe aspect and became a straight up, evening-hours-only bar and live music venue. And, of course, the best pinball venue in Lansing.
This is just another L & L stamp; at least, I assume so, though they seem to have lost the ampersand this time. The truth is that the other stamp I photographed on tonight’s walk turned out to be one I had done before (which I am now fairly sure is 1952 rather than 1957 by the way), so I have to deploy a less interesting backup. My walks have been limited due to my recent surgery and tonight I had to walk after sunset, so you’ll take this L & L stamp and you’ll like it.
This is near the driveway that leads behind 1700 East Michigan Avenue from the east side of Shepard St. It’s alongside the vacant commercial building that until recently, and for years, was Discount One Hour Signs.
This is a first for this blog: this stamp is not within the city limits of Lansing. It is just barely inside the convoluted borders of Lansing Charter Township. More specifically, it is on the north side of East Michigan Avenue between the two US-127 overpasses, just east of Feldman Chevrolet. S & N Contractors stamps are present at intervals all the way under both overpasses. There must have been a big overpass construction project in 2000. I have a very vague memory of the freeway being closed for a stretch when I was new in town, so that lines up.
I believe that S & N Contractors is most likely the one that was once located on Lansing Road, with a Charlotte address but located closer to Dimondale. OpenCorporates gives their dissolution date as 2005. I notice that the State of Michigan Department of Transportation’s materials source guide dated March 2014 lists them as an approved supplier. I don’t know whether or not that means they were still around in some form by then. In any case, they no longer seem to be in business.
I had to walk late again tonight between work and a rain shower that took up my last hour of daylight time, so it’s lucky that I ran across a well-lit stamp I haven’t done yet. This one is on the west side of Leslie Street, north of Kalamazoo and just south of Stanley Court. (“Stanley who?”) Stanley Court is a narrow, one-block street between Leslie and Shepard which avoids being one of the nameless alleys that thread through many neighborhood blocks merely because a half dozen houses do actually face it. It’s kind of an oddity since it is almost, but not quite, level with Eureka Street, which starts a couple of blocks further west.
Anyway, back to the stamp. I can find two Maxwell Const[ruction] companies in Michigan, one in Detroit and one in Lennon. I know the small town of Lennon in part because there is a delightful concrete statuary business there called Krupp’s Novelty Shop, and I bought the rabbit statue in my front garden there. Maxwell of Lennon has no Web presence, but according to Angie’s List they were founded in 2005, so that would rule them out. Maxwell of Detroit has a slick Web site and from that I learn they were founded in 2012. I suppose whatever Maxwell Construction this was, they are no longer in business.
Here is the other curb walk on Regent Street. (For those new to my blog, “curb walk” is the totally invented name I came up with for the bits of pavement that lead from the sidewalk to the curb as I don’t know what they’re actually called.) It is on the west side of the 200 block between Kalamazoo and Michigan. The stamp comes from L & L, already well represented in this blog.
Good old Y2K! I don’t remember seeing this one made even though I was walking this street to the bus stop quite a bit back then. But then, why would I remember something like that? Of course, now I’m very curious about the origin and purpose of these bits of sidewalk, so I have questions. Was there one there before and this was a replacement of it? Or did the owners of the property have one made new, and if so, why? It can’t date to the building of the house and isn’t nearly as old as the Minnis & Ewer-stamped one.
